Map Animation Generator for Videos

Explainer channels cut to a moving map every few minutes: a line arcs from one country to another, a nation fills with colour, a border creeps outward while the years tick past. Building those in After Effects takes an afternoon each. This Map Animation Generator draws them in the browser from a few countries picked from a searchable, flagged list, with ten documentary-style presets, and records the result as a video file you can drop straight onto a timeline.

Everything runs on your device. The country shapes are Natural Earth’s 1:110 million map (public domain), loaded with the page, and the video is encoded by the browser from the canvas itself, so nothing is uploaded and there is no watermark.

Worked Example: Dhaka to London in Eight Seconds

The tool opens on the flight-route preset with Bangladesh as the start, the United Kingdom as the end and the title “Dhaka to London”. At 1× speed the animation runs 8 seconds:

• The camera starts on Bangladesh and pulls back until both countries fit.
• A curved line draws from Dhaka towards London, with a plane following its heading, while a faint dashed line shows the whole route ahead.
• The United Kingdom fills in, a pin drops, and the distance appears over the middle of the arc: 7,954 km between the two countries’ label points.

Each preset card loads its own worked example: Japan with a flag card, a network from the United Arab Emirates to six countries, Africa lit up west to east, the European Union growing from 1958 to 2013, a zoom to Nepal, the 1947 Partition, a 3,000 km reach from China, a population heatmap and Vasco da Gama’s route to India as line art. Change any country, colour or theme and the preview restarts.

How the Math Bends a Route Across the Globe

A straight line on a flat map is not the shortest way between two places. Routes follow the great circle instead, found by interpolating between the two points as vectors on a sphere, then are lifted sideways by 14% of their length at the middle for the arc look viewers expect. The one exception is a great circle that swings more than 15° of latitude towards a pole beyond both ends: Dhaka to the United States really does pass 84° N, which a flat map stretches into a loop, so that leg is drawn as a clean arc the short way round the map instead. In a hub network the hub stays in the centre of the frame, and no frame is ever wider than one turn of the globe, so no country appears twice. The map uses the Miller cylindrical projection, close to the Mercator shapes of web maps but without its swollen poles, and it is drawn three times side by side, so a route from Japan to the United States crosses the Pacific instead of the whole world. The camera zooms geometrically, so a 50× zoom feels as smooth at the end as at the start.

Limits of a 1:110m World Map

At this scale the smallest states are left out: Singapore, Malta, Bahrain, the Maldives and most island nations have no shape to fill, so type a neighbouring country instead. The country search accepts common forms such as UK, USA and UAE as well as ISO codes, and lists can be put in order with the arrows or by dragging a row. A route with the same start and end stops with “Pick two different countries for the start and end of the route.” Flag cards use emoji flags, which Windows shows as two letters rather than a picture.

The Record button captures exactly the canvas at 1920 × 1080, the 16:9 YouTube frame, plus one second held on the last frame. Chrome and Edge save WebM or MP4 depending on version; Safari saves MP4. If your browser cannot record a canvas, Full screen and a system recorder give the same picture.